Beat Generation

About

The last gathering of poets and artists and City Lights; photo, Larry Keenan

This blog is a resurrection of my old Beat Generation News site from the mid-1990s to 2001. In 2000, I began publishing Jack Magazine and helping with Big Bridge Magazine. Much of the Beat News content went up here and there at Jack, but a lot of it did not. I feel it’s still a good resource for scholars and others interested in the beats, and I love the easy accessibility and structure of blogging, so am reorganizing the old site into this blog. Many of my bios are missing or need a lot more information, and for that I apologize and say hang on, I will get to it.

As usual, I have had lots of help and contributions to this old site. Adrien Begrand, Dave Moore, Larry Keenan, Gordon Ball, Andrew Lampert, Tony Trigilio, Michael Rothenberg, Jason Eisenberg, Henry Ferrini, Laki Vazakas. Hammond Guthrie, Patricia Elliot, Matthew Frondorf, John Sokol, Rinalda Rasa, Bill Hotchkiss, Em Franco, George Wallace, Michael Largo, Bob Marvin, and many others contributed to Beat Generation News. I would encourage others to submit interesting news, tidbits, and biographical information as you see fit. For larger works and poetic, artistic, or literary submissions, please see Jack Magazine.

Old Beat News Tag

This site is about the beat generation, which began in the early 1940s with Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, Herbert Huncke, Joan Vollmer Adams, Edie Parker, John Clellon Holmes, Allen Ginsberg, and a few other friends and writers. By 1955, Ginsberg and Kerouac headed out to San Francisco, where Ginsberg read “Howl” at the Six Gallery. This reading also included Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, and Philip Lamantia. The East and West Coast poets that fell into the newly expanded beat generation were under a growing bubble that would include a bunch of poets and artists–the Black Mountain College Poets, San Francisco Renaissance Poets, New York School Poets, Berkeley Poets, Bolinas Poets, Language School, and post-beat phenomena such as Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters. We can’t forget to mention Neal Cassady, the driver behind many road trips and books. Maybe what has tied so-called members of the beat generation together into one entity is still more abstract than concrete, but Kerouac’s novels, various biographies, selected letters, and poetic devotions among friends have documented the strong ties that the beats held, and still do hold.